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After a while I was able to do with five hours sleep, and often with only three, in the twenty-four. Père Othmann was not unwilling for me to follow these impulses as soon as he became convinced of their imperative strength. Yet I now see that such practices were in a certain sense mistaken.
They necessarily consumed in mortification vitality that I could now use, if I had it, in a more useful way. Still, how could I help it?" The end of this period of his humiliations, which was not far from the end of his noviceship, is thus described: "One day after Communion I was making my half-hour thanksgiving in my room, when Père Othmann came in and examined me about my form of prayer.
It was the incongruity of such a persuasion being united to a helpless inactivity of mind in matters of study that made Isaac Hecker a puzzle to his very self, to say nothing of those who had to decide his place in the order. Father Othmann, in bidding him farewell at St.
This question, however, was but the expression of a shadowy doubt, vanishing as suddenly as it had come. The novice-master was Father Othmann, and he was by universal testimony entirely competent for his place. He was himself the novitiate.
Once, at least, during those two eventful years at Wittem, Father Othmann visited the place, and when he saw Brother Hecker he embraced him and exclaimed, "O here is the spouse of the Canticles!" His farewell injunction on parting at St. Trond had been perforce complied with. It must have taken more than ordinary penetration to perceive anything but a kind of grandiose folly in Brother Hecker.
It is a little singular that Father Othmann told him that his vocation was not to be a religious, but an editor. He carried with him Brother Hecker's messages of affection to his friends and relatives, and rosaries of Isaac's own making for his mother and his brother George.
Getting leave to read it, I was overjoyed to find it a full statement of the principles by which I had been interiorly guided. I said to Père Othmann: 'Why did you not give me this book when I first came? It settles all my difficulties. But he answered that it had never once occurred to his mind to do so." Teresa, and those of St.
When Isaac Hecker presented himself as a novice he took his place among the youths learning the A, B, C of the spiritual life, while he himself had experienced for many months the most rare dealings of the Holy Ghost with the soul. This could not fail to come to the knowledge of Father Othmann, and, taken with the other peculiarities of his subject, to elicit his most skilful treatment.
He followed him constantly in his doctrine and methods, and often spoke of him and quoted him. Of other methods and their advocates he spoke respectfully, but, however much they were in vogue, he did not follow them. Brother Hecker was a faithful student in his school and learned much from Father Othmann.
Fifthly, let them lay bare the whole ground of their heart to their superior or to their spiritual father. Father Hecker had himself suffered, and that in the earliest days of his religious life, from want of explicit instruction about this doctrine. Father Othmann, whom our readers remember as the novice-master at St. Trond, was too spiritual a man to have been ignorant of its principles.
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